This is not really a blog post

by Heather Plett | Jun 23, 2014 | Uncategorized

I’ve been trying and trying to write a decent blog post lately.

I thought I’d write about how amazing it’s been to watch my firstborn daughter blossom recently. How proud I was to watch her finish her first half marathon in under two hours. How gratifying it is to see her graduate, how hard she’s worked at her art lately and how amazing it was to watch her dance around the room when she got her acceptance letter from the school of fine arts. How proud I was to watch her do a public presentation on why feminism is still important for young women today. How courageously she forges her own path and wore a sleek black pant jumpsuit to her graduation when almost every other girl wore a brightly coloured, highly bedazzled princess dress.

I thought I’d write that, but I kept getting stuck. I don’t quite know how to tell my daughters’ stories in ways that honour their right to tell them themselves.

Before that, I thought I’d write about the amazing circles I’ve hosted and been part of recently, and how I want to do so much more of this work and help it grow all over the world. I thought I’d rave about Gather the Women and the great love I’ve found there, and how you should all consider joining me at their annual gathering in Rapid City, South Dakota in September. Or how you can get a taste of that circle love online this Friday in the Openhearted Writing Circle.

I thought I’d write that, but I just couldn’t figure out how to articulate all that I want to say about circles. Sometimes it’s hard to put it all into words without losing the heart of it.

I also thought I’d write more about how so many circle patterns are spiraling inward, getting closer and closer and starting to intertwine with each other – circle gatherings, mandalas, labyrinths, etc. How it’s starting to make sense why they’ve all found their way into my life, and how it feels like my calling is being refined as being a co-creator of Circles of Connection. How I plan to spend part of my summer painting a portable labyrinth and making some large outdoor nature-based mandalas. How I want to write a book about The Circular Woman.

I wanted to write that, but then it started to feel a little premature and I decided I needed to spend a little more time with my own thoughts before I try to express them.

And then I thought I should just do a gratitude post, where I talk about how grateful I am for my life right now. How good it’s been to feel more settled in this self-employment journey. How beautifully busy I’ve been in the past few months, hosting retreats, teaching classes, coaching, traveling, and creating Summer Lovin’, and how hopeful it makes me feel when I see so many new names showing up to buy my books, sign up for my courses, etc. How excited I am that this is finally generating enough income that we can take our children on a road trip this summer.

I wanted to write that, but I was too busy living the life and being grateful in the moments of it to try to refine it into a blog post.

I also thought I’d write something about teaching from the heart. How it’s been a bit of a journey to find my teaching voice, feeling the pressure of needing to be more academic and yet knowing that what the students need comes not only from my head but from my heart. How gratifying it feels to hear from students that the meaning they get from my classes goes far beyond the course content. How I still struggle sometimes to find the right balance and trust myself in forging a different path than what might be expected.

I considered writing that, but it’s hard to write some of those stories without betraying confidences and sharing things that are not mine to share.

I even thought I’d write a post about the table I’m refurbishing. How I picked up a solid table and chairs from a neighbour on Giveaway Day, and how I’m now covering up the scratches on the top with a bunch of black and white photos I found in an old photography book. How delighted I am with the way it’s turning out, and how this upcycling process offers one such lovely time for contemplating the way we transform life’s messes into beauty.

I tried to write that, but I couldn’t find the right balance between design tips and metaphor for life.

Yes, I’ve tried to write many blog posts, but the truth is, what I need right not is not a blog post.

What I need right now is some stillness.

There is so much swirling around in my head and heart that I can’t seem to focus on one thing long enough to write about it.

There is so much to be grateful for and so much to celebrate, but I know myself well and I know this… to integrate all of this growth and change and learning and goodness into my life, I need to be still with it for awhile. I need to let it whisper meaning into my heart. I need to sink into it like a bathtub full of hot water and let it wash over me and change me.

It’s summer, and it’s the perfect time to take a little break from the teaching, writing, thinking and processing. It’s the perfect time to go for long walks, sit on the beach, play on the swings, and hang out with loved ones around the campfire.

It’s the perfect time for a little stillness, gratitude and mindfulness. And that’s what I’ll be seeking in the next few weeks.

Summer Lovin’ – A Mindfulness Journal

by Heather Plett | Jun 16, 2014 | Uncategorized

I’ve created something to help you “walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet” this summer. It’s called Summer Lovin’: a mindfulness journal.

These things I know:

• Mindfulness improves the quality of your life.
• It’s easier to be mindful if you keep a journal.

I’ve been keeping a journal since I was twelve years old. I haven’t kept it consistently, but when I look back at the trajectory of my life, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that in those times when I was keeping a journal, I was:

• more mindful,
• more grateful,
• more prepared for hardship,
• more centred and grounded,
• more present in my relationships, and
• more cognizant of how the world impacted me.

Here’s another couple of things I know:

• Writing regularly improves your creativity and problem-solving ability.
• According to Malcolm Gladwell, you have to put in 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. This includes writing.

Even if writing is not your artistry of choice, journal-writing can enhance your creativity, especially if that writing is helping you to be more mindful of the world around you. If writing IS your artistry of choice (or you have to blog regularly to support your work), then writing in a journal is a vital way to put in those 10,000 hours.

Summer Lovin’ is a simple journal which will help you be more mindful of your world and your inner landscape throughout the summer. It will also help you stretch your creative writing muscles.

There are 60 simple journal prompts in Summer Lovin’. Each day, you’ll be encouraged to notice something – whether it’s the colour red, the sky, or something mysterious in the world around you – and then write about it. Some prompts are fanciful, some are simply about noticing details, some invite you to reach back into your past, some are about relationships, and some help you explore the world of your imagination.

In creating Summer Lovin’ I’ve drawn on many years of teaching writing and creativity workshops, coaching writers, and doing my own mindfulness journal writing. Some of these prompts have been used in my workshops, and many of them are new. Many of them were written while I sat on the grass under a big tree near the river – one of my favourite places to write and be mindful.

Click on the image to see a sample page.

For only $10, you’ll receive 60 prompts to help be more mindful this summer.

OR you can do it in community, or with your family, or with your writing group or book club. The prompts are easy enough for a 10 year old to do. Why not sign your whole family up and make a commitment to mindfulness for the summer? Each morning, read the prompt for that day at breakfast, invite your family members to be mindful of what that day is inviting, find some time to write about it, and then discuss it over supper in the evening.

For only $20, you can download multiple copies for your family or small group to do it together. (If you wish to download or print more than 12 copies, please contact me.)

Are you ready for a more mindful summer?

Once you make the purchase, you’ll be sent to a private page where you can download the journal in one of two formats:

• As a 33 page pdf that includes space for your writing.
• As a 13 page pdf that includes only the prompts (and you can write in your own journal).

Questions? Feel free to contact me.

Have a happy, mindful summer!

It gets better

by Heather Plett | Jun 3, 2014 | Uncategorized

This morning I was flipping through a couple of old journals, looking for something I’d written. Around ten years ago, after reading a book called The Path, I’d written a personal mission statement about the work I wanted to do in the future. I’d also written a vision of what a day in my life might be like five years in the future.

Although I hadn’t read that journal entry for quite some time, I knew that my life had come very close to what I had hoped it would become. In that entry, I’d talked about facilitating leadership retreats and having my first book published. I also mentioned my hopes of having a regular column published. (I didn’t know about blogs at the time, so I was thinking purely traditional publishing – but this is just fine too.)

This is the mission statement I wrote: “It is my mission to inspire excellence in people, to facilitate personal growth and the discovery of gifts, and to serve as a catalyst for positive change.” Sounds like what I do now, right?

At the time, though, my paid work was quite far out of alignment with that mission statement. I was in a job that made me miserable and that had very little to do with my giftedness. I was the primary communicator for a high security federal laboratory, dealing with the media on the latest health scare – SARS, West Nile, Mad Cow Disease, etc., and working as part of a management team that was full of toxic energy.

What I didn’t realize until I looked back into my journal, was that I managed to write that mission statement and vision for my life at the darkest time of my life. It’s painful to read the journal entries from that year. At the beginning of the year, I ended my maternity leave for my third daughter and returned to my miserable job, worried that this might be all there would be to my life. As soon as I got back to work, SARS hit in Toronto, which meant that I was suddenly on call to media from all over the world twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. (I remember the phone ringing in my pocket in church on Easter morning.) Exhausted from motherhood and emotionally and spiritually shut down from a job that killed my spirit and drained every bit of my energy, all I could do in my journal was weep and moan.

Then it got worse. In August of that year, my dad was killed in a tragic farm accident. It suddenly felt like the ground had been ripped out from under my feet and I was in free-fall. The first journal entry after dad died is short and in tiny handwriting – like I’d shrunken and no longer knew how to speak.

It kept getting worse. Two weeks after dad died, my uncle died very suddenly while on a camping trip. Two months later, my grandma died. In the middle of all of that grief, Mom wanted to move off the farm, so we had to sort through all of their lifetime’s worth of belongings, hold an auction sale, sell the farm, and move Mom into an apartment. Mom was an emotional mess, so on top of trying to be a half-decent parent to my small kids, and trying to hold together a demanding job, I was trying (with my siblings) to be her emotional support.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I started to dream of something different. I think I was desperate for some pinpoint of light in the middle of all that darkness. My mission statement and journal entry were written not long after grandma died, when the bad had gotten worse, and when I was afraid to answer the phone because every phone call seemed to report another death.

I’m not sharing this story to depress you, but to give you some measure of hope. If you’re in the middle of the darkness, keep looking for those points of light. Keep dreaming that some day, it might get better. Keep daring to believe in hope.

Thankfully, the next year things started to shift. I left the government for a non-profit job that excited me, and nobody close to me died for several years.

It’s not a straight path to “better”. It’s a bumpy, curvy one, and having gone through another really bad year last year (when mom died, Marcel had a heart attack, and I broke my foot), I have to be honest and say that this will not be your only bad year.

But it does get better, again and again. This Spring has been full of hope and light for me again. I’m doing work I absolutely love. Just over a week ago, I hosted a women’s retreat and this coming weekend, I’ll be guest speaker at another retreat. In between, I’ve been teaching classes, coaching clients, and hosting conversations with deep meaning and purpose. My daughters are happy and healthy and growing into beautiful young women. My marriage is in a more solid place than it’s been in the past. I am content. Life is good.

Life hasn’t turned out exactly as I’d hoped (too many people have died), but I am doing the work that I dared to hold out a vision for, and I have found happiness slowly beginning to grow out of grief, again and again.

And… what I know for certain is that I couldn’t be doing this work as effectively as I do if I didn’t know what darkness feels like.

And that, my friends, is what I hope for you. Look for light, and let the darkness change you. If you feel like giving up hope, if you’ve waited far too long for the lights to come back on, I want to encourage you to hang on just a little longer. You will grow stronger from your time of darkness and the strength will prepare you for the light.

Sit down and write your mission statement and your vision for a day five years from now. It might take ten years to get there (as mine did), but with intention and a stubborn commitment to hope, things will shift and you will head toward that which calls you.

Don’t give up. Carry on. Be faithful to your vision and your hope. It does get better.

***

If you want to write your way through the darkness or through the light, consider joining the next Openhearted Writing Circle on June 27.

If you’re looking for a companion on the bumpy, curvy path, check out Pathfinder.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Sign Up For Mandala Discovery

by Heather Plett | May 28, 2014 | Uncategorized

In my Writing for PR class, I teach students that they should always focus on the benefits to the reader/client. “What’s in it for them?” is a common question in the class.  And yet… I don’t often follow my own advice. Why? Mmmm… I’m not sure. I’m stubborn, perhaps? I prefer writing stories to writing lists? I like breaking rules?

Whatever the case, I thought it might be fun to give you ten benefits you might receive if you sign up for the next Mandala Discovery class, which starts June 1.

1. Mandala-making helps you deal with stress. It’s a calming, meditative process that helps to silence the gremlins in your mind.
2. It’s a good excuse to buy yourself a new set of Sharpies.
3. Because of its use of both colour and words, lines and blank space, order and chaos, this unique mandala journaling process helps you access both your right brain and left brain.
4. Everybody needs some play time. Why should your kids have all the fun?
5. The prompts that come with each mandala process have lots of great content and wisdom in them. It’s much more than just instructions on how to make a mandala – it’s a daily guide for how to process your own life.
6. You can do it with a friend, your grade 4 students, or even your grandmother. Others have.
7. It’s been known to help people through both grief and recovery programs.
8. You’ll learn new things about yourself. Even the resistance (when you just don’t want to follow the instructions) can become your teacher.
9. The process has been known to help past participants find greater direction and deeper spirituality in their lives.
10. You get to be messy and it doesn’t matter, because IT’S ABOUT THE PROCESS NOT THE PRODUCT!

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what one participant said: “30 Days of Mandala Journaling was such an uplifting and spiritual experience for me. Creating mandalas to the prompts Heather provided each day opened up my mind to see what sometimes was hiding deep within and other times right on the surface just waiting to be noticed. And it was FUN drawing and coloring! I look at my mandala journal often.” There are lots more testimonials on the sales page.

Are you ready to join us? You have until Saturday, May 31st to register.